Apple still hasn’t finished their review of the Overlord! update yet, but I suppose they’re probably busy, what with the millions of other apps being updated at the same time.

In the meantime I’ve got the work finished on Tick’d Off and that is now in the Apple review queue as well.

Starting on Wicca Plus now.

Finally, for the 5 or 6 people who actually use PassGenR, the bad news is that I’ve de-listed it. It was only ever marginally useful at best, but nowadays with things like iCloud keychain, 1Password, and all the other modern password stuff… Anyhow, if you’ve got it, it’ll keep running of course. It works on iOS 8. It’s just not being updated any further.

Aside from the iOS stuff, still going through a lot of personal and work-related stress, and there does appear to be a light at the end of the tunnel.

As long as that light isn’t the front of a freight train coming my way, things should be ok in another couple months.

Things have been a bit slower than intended around here, but I am getting my apps updated for iOS 8 and the iPhone 6 and 6 plus.

I should mention, I did test my apps against iOS 8 (beta 5) in August and things all appeared to be working fine, so I don’t anticipate that anything has broken since Apple released 8 to the public yesterday.

Overlord! has just been submitted to Apple, it went first as I was already working on some tweaks for it when the information about the embiggened iPhones came out. I’ll post an announcement when it’s been released.

I’m a bit hesitant though as I sort of expect we might see a new iPad size or resolution next month, which will mean everything would have to be updated yet again to support it. Apart from rumours of an iPad Pro or Plus or whatever, there’s some hints that I think suggest a new iPad resolution of 2400×1800 pixels (or 1200 x 900 @2x retina).

It’s not that it’d be a huge amount of work, just the app update / submission / approval / release process itself is a huge pain in the arse and Apple sort of actively punishes developers for updating, by wiping out all the reviews and ratings every time you update.

So you work hard to build a good app and get a good reputation, then do the right thing and release an update, and they punish you by taking away your reputation and showing the app as not-rated again. Thanks Apple, we appreciate that.

(Incidently that’s why you see apps that nag you to leave reviews or ‘rate this app’. Because even if you have already rated & reviewed it, that was all wiped when the dev released a new update. So every update needs to be rated / reviewed. I won’t nag you in my apps for ratings / reviews, but I would very much appreciate if you would rate & review. Thanks!)

Anyhow, app-submission headaches aside, they’ve been dropping hints for 2 years that device sizes would be changing so I’ve built all my apps accordingly, so they already respond to varied sizes and dimensions. The aggravation is that Apple doesn’t just automatically let apps adapt to new phone (or iPad) sizes.

You have to ‘unlock’ the new size by including the appropriately sized launch image.

That’s it. Just a specific sized PNG in the app bundle.

But you can’t do that till they unlock the appropriate size in the development tools, which doesn’t happen till after they have their big announcements, etc. etc.

So you have different launch images for every device (and every orientation you support). Then there’s all the app icons. Different sizes. @2x. Now @3x as well…

Anyhow, I’ve wandered off into a bit of a rant. Sorry about that.

App updates are forthcoming. I’m still here, just keeping quiet as I deal with some stuff. Stay tuned for more news.

While I would prefer not to pre-announce new features / additions incase unforseen circumstances mean some things have to be dropped or delayed, there are a couple things which will definitely be included in the next release:

Southern Hemisphere Support – the sabbats section has been rewritten and a new option added to the Settings screen, allowing the app to correctly display the sabbats and lunar phases for everyone in the Southern hemisphere.

More Accurate Lunar Data – the Full and New Moon times were originally calculated using some math based on the average lunation period. This was only accurate to within plus or minus several hours, as the Moon’s orbit is not quite circular. I’ve now incorporated lunar data from a NASA website, which is accurate to less than 3 minutes from now till the end of the year 2100.

A New Font – this is purely cosmetic, but the Papyrus font is somewhat stale and old. I’ve found a new font which I rather like; hopefully this won’t draw more complaints than Papyrus did.

Change The Title – a new option has been added to the Settings screen, enabling users to change the title of the book. I have always called my book Liber Umbrarum et Lux but you can name your book as you see fit. This affects the Main / Contents page, and the Front Cover screen (in the Prefixes section.)

Minor bug fixes, performance improvements, and as always, corrections to spelling mistakes that slipped through the content editing.

New entries and some other new features are also in the works.

There’s no ETA for when this update will be out. Originally I had a tentative target date of Imbolc, but we got hit hard just after Yule by an ice storm and that has set things back by a week or more.